Page 3941 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 15 Sept 2009
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the ANU suggests that some of our carbon stores around the country are and will be an important part of our climate response. Stopping logging in our native forests is a good place to start. A recent report by Brendan Mackey and his colleagues at the Fenner School at the ANU outlines the impact that stopping native forest logging in Australia could have on our carbon bottom line, and the implications were significant.
If Australia were to cease logging our native forests and allow them to reach their full sequestration potential, they could sequester an additional 136 megatonnes of CO2 per year for the next hundred years. That is in the region of 24 per cent of Australia’s emissions, so clearly this is an important issue. However, that is something for the state Labor governments, the federal Labor government and the Liberal government in Western Australia to address—although anything Mr Corbell can do to encourage them along this path might be very helpful.
This report that we are discussing today, also from the Fenner School at the ANU, is a welcome assessment of the ACT’s carbon sequestration status and gives us valuable information about the potential of the ACT’s urban and non-urban carbon stocks and potential as a store over the next decade. It also provides useful information about the carbon stores that were affected by the Canberra bushfires, which I will come back to shortly.
The government has, on occasion, taken pot shots at the Greens when we have sought to raise criticisms of the government’s funding of the arboretum as a climate change measure, saying that we do not like trees. Well, Madam Assistant Speaker Burch, we do like trees; we like trees for all sorts of reasons, as I outlined above, but we do not believe that planting trees should constitute the bulk of a $100 million program to address climate change. I note your own comments, Madam Assistant Speaker, at the switch to green conference the other day, where you described the arboretum as a significant response to climate change.
To date, the government has allocated $60 million out of the $100 million of its climate change program to tree planting projects, including both the arboretum and the urban tree replacement program. As I say, spending government money on tree replacement programs is understandable, but labelling programs that would have occurred anyway and dressing them up as climate spending is not helpful, and I think the new minister for climate change probably appreciates this. We will have a limited bucket of money to allocate to the suite of climate-related measures that need to be implemented, and we will need to consider how we get the best abatement value for our money.
We must also keep a perspective on the capacity of carbon storage to actually deliver the emissions reductions that the ACT requires in order to reduce our greenhouse gas profile to the extent that we must. We have just received this morning the outcomes of the inquiry into climate change targets, and I think it would be interesting to see how the debate on this plays out. There is no doubt that the debate will be a considerable one over the next few months. The committee has recommended a 40 per cent target. That means we will need to take significant action quickly to cut our greenhouse gas emissions if we are to achieve that very appropriate target, because it is a target that reflects what the scientists are telling us we need to do.
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